This week’s New York Magazine takes a look back those wacky days of 1968 and lands in “the neighborhood known as Park Slope.” There is nothing we can add to this, so we’ll just quote a few highlights:
So what’s a penny-pinching Manhattanite to do? It’s time to consider—and don’t laugh just yet—Brooklyn. Specifically, the neighborhood known as Park Slope, the four-block-wide strip along Prospect Park that runs east-west from Flatbush Avenue to about 9th Street. Admittedly, it has none of the jolt of Manhattan living, and it’s way short on shops and places to eat. (Seventh Avenue, the area’s commercial strip, is as sleepy as any suburb after dark.) Once blue-collar and mostly Irish, the area has a mix of poorer residents now, and crime is a worry, especially below Sixth Avenue. In some pockets, vacant lots have been abandoned. Rumor has it that banks are redlining the area.
But here’s the payoff: If you do manage to get a mortgage loan, an entire brownstone full of Victorian details costs as much as a half-floor loft in the Village—about $20,000. There are enough original houses, in fact, that activists are saying Park Slope should become a landmark district like Brooklyn Heights.
Redlining? $20,000? Shoot us now.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Richard // Feb 11, 2008 at 6:09 pm
I grew up in Flatlands/Mill Basin and as a kid and a teenager, I considered Park Slope a slum. I remember driving on Flatbush Avenue every morning to school in 1965-66 with my father, and around Seventh Avenue, there was a big “Cinderella Project” office. My father explained that this was a project of the Brooklyn Union Gas Company and some “crazy people” who were trying to get buyers for “those horrible old houses.”
When I started Brooklyn College in 1969, I began to have friends in Park Slope, all from working class Irish and Ukranian families whose grandparents still lived there (usually they were the ones who owned the houses).
I remember going into the Key Food on Seventh Avenue and thinking it was the most disgusting slum supermarket I had ever been in.
J.J. Byrne Park was a good place to buy nickel bags, though.
2 Anonymous // Feb 14, 2008 at 8:28 am
I grew up in the South Slope and my parents had a German Delicatessen on Seventh Avenue between 10th and 11th Streets (Henry’s). They purchased it 1975 for $10,500, after renting the store for several years. A short time after that, they came down in the morning to find a dead body outside their door, after which they installed a wrought iron security gate. I remember worrying about them living in the nighborhood at that time – it was very dicey. After 23 years of living in Manhattan, I moved back to the building in 1990 when my parents began to fail. You’d better believe I bless them every day for buying the building back then!
3 Anonymous // Feb 15, 2008 at 9:45 pm
With the inflation taken into account we get a price tag of $122K still of course very nice for a brownstone!
For the store from 1975, we got $43K, how nice too…
Well done for the buyers, well timed…